The Limits of Social Democracy and the Role of Revolutionaries

In January 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as Mayor of New York City, in an abandoned subway station beneath City Hall, placing his hand on two copies of the Qur’an. Bernie Sanders was present, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a speech in which she declared that the city had chosen courage over fear, and prosperity for the many over spoils for the few. Mamdani stood before his audience and said that he refused to ask New Yorkers to demand little and expect less, and that the only hope he sought to recalibrate was the hope of small expectations.

Mamdani was New York’s first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian descent to hold the office, and one of the youngest to occupy it in modern history. He won more than a million votes from a campaign funded by donations alone. No candidate for the city’s mayoralty had reached that vote count since 1969. Behind that number stood a social bloc of immigrant home-care workers, taxi drivers, tenants threatened with eviction, young people who came out to vote for the first time, and the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities that saw in his rise a belated acknowledgment of their existence. These are the people who put him in office. And it is to them that this article is addressed.

What Mamdani Delivered

On his first day, Mamdani rescinded the executive orders issued by his predecessor Eric Adams, among them two orders that had barred the city’s agencies from boycotting Israel and imposed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a definition that classifies certain forms of criticism of Israel as antisemitism. This repeal was highly significant, especially coming from a mayor who had gathered many of his votes through his solidarity with the Palestinian cause, governing a city that is among the largest centers of Zionist lobbying in the world.

He signed an executive order requiring immigration-authority agents to obtain a judicial warrant before entering city property, including schools, shelters, and hospitals. His administration launched a “Know Your Rights” campaign in ten languages and distributed thirty thousand flyers in places of worship. In a city stalked by Trump and his agencies, this act was a real shield for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

In the area of childcare, on his eighth day Mamdani launched the “2-K” program in partnership with the state governor, providing free care for thousands of two-year-old children—a step toward universal care for children from six weeks to five years old. For the first time in the city’s history, free care was offered to two-year-olds regardless of parental income, in a city where the average parental spending on a single child’s care exceeded twenty-three thousand dollars a year.

In the area of penal reform, his administration committed to closing Rikers Island prison and appointed Stanley Richards as Commissioner of the Department of Correction, the first person to have experienced incarceration from the inside to lead that department. The first treatment unit, with one hundred and four beds, was opened at Bellevue Hospital for the most vulnerable inmates, and full compliance with the ban on solitary confinement was ordered. On housing, he issued the ambitious “Neighborhood by Neighborhood” plan to build two hundred thousand affordable homes and preserve two hundred thousand others over a decade, launched “Fast-Track” reforms that cut the development time for affordable housing, established an Office of Tenant Protection, and appointed six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board—the board that decides on rent freezes for some two million residents. In his first months, the city recorded the lowest crime rates and the fewest road deaths in nearly its entire recorded history, according to the police’s own figures.

Mamdani achieved very important gains for the residents of New York. Working women could now work without paying thousands of dollars for their children’s care, and immigrants and refugees found their homes a little further beyond the reach of the immigration authority. Yet despite these gains, Mamdani remains limited in what he can accomplish, because he operates within a system that serves the ruling class.

The Battle of Home-Care Workers Against the Long Working Day

In New York there are about one hundred and thirty thousand home-care workers, ninety percent of them women, and seventy percent of them immigrants. These women are subject to a brutal rule: a worker works a continuous twenty-four-hour shift but is paid for only thirteen hours, on the pretext that the remaining hours are time for eating and sleeping. The workers described this day as torture that deprives them of sleep and inflicts permanent disabilities on their bodies. One of them said she had worked sixteen years under this system until it destroyed her health, and that this working day exists nowhere else in the world.

Mamdani, as a state assembly member in 2022, had co-sponsored a bill that would have banned these shifts entirely. He promised this in his campaign. Then he became mayor. And he intervened to propose giving workers the “option” to work twenty-four hours rather than banning it—a retreat from the principle of abolition.

The workers responded by organizing. They began on International Women’s Day with a sit-in in front of City Hall, wrapped in blankets in the bitter March cold. The matter then escalated into a hunger strike waged by fifteen elderly immigrant women. The workers accused Mamdani’s legal team of working to weaken the law’s wording, until it came to exempt unionized workers and to permit long shifts with written “consent.” In an open letter signed by one hundred and thirty-six workers, they said that those subjected to this day are beaten every night by a hidden weapon that keeps them awake. They accused Mamdani of having told Council Member Marte that Governor Hochul had threatened to withhold the city’s funding if the law passed.

But the betrayal did not stop at the workers alone. Behind every care worker stands an elderly or disabled person whose daily life depends on her care; and when the woman works exhausted and sleepless, the quality of the care these people receive deteriorates. For this reason many disability-rights activists stood alongside the law, and one of them said that anyone who keeps this day in place is “no different from slave owners of the past.” And behind the workers stand their families who live on a docked wage; the organizers in the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association who built this campaign over years; and the students and professors of New York University who donated to the strike and wrote a letter condemning the mayor’s retreat. This is a class network of solidarity, a fabric of immigrants, women, the sick, and students—one that Mamdani let down all at once when he chose to manage the pressures rather than confront them.

The same structure recurs with other blocs of his voters. The tenants who voted for him on the promise of a rent freeze and of dropping the appeal against expanding the “CityFHEPS” rental-assistance program found his administration continuing the appeal it had inherited from Adams. Christine Quinn, director of the city’s largest shelter operator, said that candidate Mamdani and mayor-elect Mamdani had both promised to drop the appeal on day one, and that this was a classic example of a promise made and a promise broken. As for the homeless, whose encampment sweeps Mamdani had suspended on his fifth day, the sweeps returned in less than seven weeks.

This came in the wake of a deadly cold wave—even though none of the victims had been living in those encampments.

And the bus riders among the poor, for whom the slogan of free buses had been raised, Mamdani himself admitted that their promise would not be fulfilled in 2026; indeed the bus fare rose on the very day he took office.

On the matter of policing, where Mamdani had risen on a discourse rejecting the expansion of the police apparatus, came the harshest test. On January 26, a police officer fired four times at Jabez Chakraborty, a twenty-two-year-old Bangladeshi youth, less than a minute after entering his home, when his family had called an ambulance for a mental-health crisis he was going through. Mamdani’s response was to express his gratitude to the first responders. The family replied with a question that sums up the tragedy: Why does the mayor applaud officers who nearly killed our son before our eyes? Worse still, Mamdani kept Jessica Tisch, Adams’s police commissioner, in her post—in stark contradiction with his promises to entire communities that had voted for him in order to escape the violence of this apparatus.

Here lies the lesson. Mamdani’s promise to the care workers was a covenant with the weakest layer of the urban working class, immigrant women of color who carry the city on their backs. And when the moment of fulfillment came, Mamdani chose to manage the pressures rather than confront them. He chose to negotiate with capital and with the upper levels of the state instead of fully aligning with those who elected him.

Why Social Democracy Remains Limited

It is easy to read these retreats as personal betrayal or weakness of will. But Mamdani did not retreat because he is necessarily a coward or an opportunist. He retreated because the office he holds is governed by a structure larger than himself. The mayoralty is a position within the apparatus of the capitalist state. The city is besieged by a budget that inherited a twelve-billion-dollar deficit; it is subject to a state governor who wields the weapon of withholding funding, and to a federal administration led by Trump, who has publicly threatened to choke the city financially as long as Mamdani is in it. The credit-rating agencies monitor every decision. The City Council negotiates over every line item. Municipal power, however radical its occupant, remains constrained by the higher state and by the capital that funds it.

This is the limit of social democracy when it is reduced to elected office. It promises to redistribute the surplus within the system, without touching the structure of production itself, nor the relations of property, nor the state as an instrument for perpetuating the dominance of the propertied class. It provides free childcare—and that is good—but it retreats before a threat to withhold funding, because it accepts the rules and moves within the very system that causes the crises it tries to solve. A “socialism” that aspires to govern through the ballot box, without building an independent class power capable of imposing its will outside parliament, always finds itself in the position of the compromiser. It wins the office and loses the condition that makes the office meaningful.

The workers who staged a sit-in in front of City Hall understand this class reality before any theorist formulates it. The workers who refused to let Mamdani promise them the freedom of “choice” instead of abolition were teaching us a lesson in the limits of representation: no one liberates you by proxy. The force that won the election must remain organized after it, independent of the elected official, capable of holding him to account.

How to Make Use of His Presence in Office: The Task of Revolutionaries

The question here is not whether we support Mamdani or reject him. That is a naive question. The question was framed by Rosa Luxemburg more than a century ago in Reform or Revolution: reform and revolution are not a calm road and a stormy one to the same end, but two roads to two different ends. Whoever settles for legislative reform as a substitute for seizing power replaces the building of a new society with a patching-up of the surface of the old society, so that the program becomes the reform of capitalism rather than its transcendence, the easing of exploitation rather than its abolition. But Luxemburg did not disdain the daily struggle; she saw in it the only means of waging the class war, on condition that it remain connected to the end. When that connection is severed, reform turns into a Sisyphean labor, a boulder pushed to the summit only to roll back down. Our task, then, is to grasp this thread: to wage every partial battle with Mamdani as a school for the class.

First, the presence of a mayor who raises the banner of socialism has opened a wide political space. Words like “redistribution,” “tenants’ rights,” and “police funding” have become part of the discussions of millions of people. The election that carried Mamdani to City Hall revealed to millions that their adversary can be defeated in at least one battle. But Luxemburg warns us that the consciousness born in an electoral campaign quickly withers unless it is embodied in a permanent organization that outlasts the election period. Our task is to fill this space with organization, not with applause. Every care worker who has learned to stage a sit-in, every tenant who has learned that her demand is legitimate, every young person who came out to vote for the first time, these are raw material for a class movement that transcends the mayor, on the condition that we transform the enthusiasm of the moment into an organizational structure that endures when the lights dim.

Second, the retreats themselves are pedagogical tools. In The State and Revolution, Lenin repeated the lesson Marx had drawn from the Paris Commune: the working class cannot lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own benefit, because this machinery, with its army, its bureaucracy, and its police, is an instrument of class domination designed for a single purpose: to serve the interests of the ruling class. All previous revolutions, Lenin says, perfected and completed this machinery, whereas the task of the working class’s revolution is to smash it, not to inherit it. Mamdani today sits at the head of this machinery, governing through it and from within it.

When he keeps the police commissioner appointed by his predecessor, when he submits to a threat to withhold funding, and when the encampment sweeps return weeks after suspending them, he proves by his own action what Lenin said: that whoever governs with the instrument of the propertied class governs in its interest in the end, however sincere his intentions. The bureaucracy he inherited, the budget shackled to creditors, and the rating agencies that monitor every line item—these are not incidental obstacles that vanish with a bolder mayor; they are the very structure of the capitalist state working as it was designed to. Our task is to turn this living proof into consciousness, not into despair. To say to all whom he let down: your anger is just, and its lesson is that your power lies in your independent organization, not in the promise of a man seated within an inherited machinery.

Third, we must back every partial battle that people wage from below, and pressure the administration from the left without respite. When the students and professors of New York University came out in a letter condemning Mamdani’s retreat, and when the workers continued their daily sit-in, that was the real politics, the Luxemburgian connection between the daily struggle and the ultimate end. Luxemburg drew a sharp distinction between those who demand reform as a station in the class war, and those who demand it as a substitute for that war; the first builds the power of the class, the second lulls it to sleep. Our role is to extend every partial battle in the first direction: to connect the care worker threatened by the long working day, the tenant threatened with eviction, the immigrant hunted by the immigration authority, and the bus rider whose fare has risen. These demands seem separate, but they spring from a single relation of exploitation, and the revolutionary’s task is to reveal the thread that binds them, so that scattered demands turn into a single class consciousness. Every battle we win in this way becomes a platform for the greater demand, not a ceiling to settle for and rest upon.

Fourth, organizational and intellectual independence must be preserved. Engaging in Mamdani’s battles does not mean dissolving into his campaign or his party. Lenin founded the Bolshevik party precisely to separate the revolutionary forces from the reformist Mensheviks—not because he disdained mass struggle, but because he understood that the moment of crisis sorts the ranks, and that a class without its independent organized instrument finds itself defenseless when the hour of reckoning comes. So we must work with Mamdani where he advances, and pressure him where he retreats.

Conclusion

Zohran Mamdani is not an enemy, but he is not a liberator either. He is the product of a class moment, and a mirror of its limits. His rise is proof that millions of people in the heart of the empire are thirsting for an alternative, and that they are ready to turn out, to vote, and to organize for it. And his retreats are proof that the office alone reshapes whoever occupies it, and that the ballot box wins the chairs but loses the real power unless it is backed by a force organized at the sites of production and in the streets.

The women workers who put him in office taught him—and taught us—that liberation is not granted from above, nor bought with a vote in a box, but wrested from below by the hands of those who have the only stake in wresting it. Mamdani will negotiate, because his position compels him to negotiate. And that is why we must organize the class that does not negotiate over its dignity, the class that sees in a socialist mayor a station on a long road. The moment that these millions made with their bodies and their voices is too precious to be left to a single man to manage alone within the walls of City Hall.

Read the Arabic Original here.